Attempts to plan the economy to protect the environment or lift up marginalized people, no matter how appealing to the sentimental, are doomed to break apart on the rocks of reality, we’re told. The only force we can trust to fine-tune the economy for maximum efficiency, and thus produce a margin we can use for “luxuries” like health care and social programs, is the free market.

Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” will work its magic if it can be freed from over-regulation and red tape.

Does all this sound familiar? It should, as it paraphrases most of the media and commentariat’s received wisdom. Socialism and central planning are stale-dated, fatally inefficient and discredited, we are told, and should be buried on the ash heap of history together with that stiff from Lenin’s tomb and Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book.

Local writers Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski take a different view. In their irreverent and lucid new book, The People’s Republic of Walmart, they argue that the evidence for the usefulness of planning can be found, not in discredited experiments like the USSR, but among the titans and icons of postmodern capitalism like Walmart, Amazon and Shell.

These are, they point out gleefully, command and control economies on the scale of the USSR in its prime, and they seem to work just fine, if you can ignore their toxic impacts on the environment and the lives of workers and consumers. The authors believe that it is not enough to scorn Walmart and other mega-firms for their evil impacts; anyone who wants a better world needs to learn from them.

All of this is presented in good-humoured, non-rhetorical language.

Michael Rozworski co-authored The People’s Republic of Walmart: How the World’s Largest Corporations are Laying the Foundation for Socialism.PNG

Leigh Phillips co-authored The People’s Republic of Walmart: How the World’s Largest Corporations are Laying the Foundation for Socialism.PNG files

This provocative and persuasive book is designed for at least two audiences: Already committed socialists who will be interested in the fine-grain history of technical disputes within political economy and encouraged by the suggestion that economic democracy may still be thinkable; and general readers (especially the young voters who have been driving pro-socialist polling results across North America currently) who want to take another look at the socialist project in the long shadow of our current capitalist crises of environment and social equity.

Both audiences will find much here to provoke thought, and even hope.

Tom Sandborn lives and writes in Vancouver. He welcomes feedback and story tips at tos65@telus.net